Sunflowers everybody loves them in this video. I'm going to show you how to save sunflower seeds.
Hi, this is Jeremy stark here from green thumb Gardner here to give you some tips tutorials and reviews for all your gardening needs in
Today's video. I'm gonna show you a very simple way on how to save sunflower seeds
You can you can apply these steps to it
Basically any sunflowers that you have so it could be those huge mammoth
Giant sunflower seeds or it could be the a little bit smaller ones that that are maybe about this size
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Let me get that out of the way. Let's get right into the show
alright
so what you want to do - first know when you're when your sunflowers are actually ready to go -
Ready to partly harvest for the seeds
There's a couple of different ways that you can that you can make sure that they are ready first. Obviously the the
basically, the flower heads are gonna dry up and they're gonna
Lose their color. So they're gonna go from yellow to pretty much brown
You know what? I would I would also suggest is the birds really love these seeds
so if there's any way that you can sort of
Hide them from their view or kind of keep them
I what I what I generally do is when I know that they're that they're ready to go
If I have them in a container, I just kind of put the container up against you know
something like a fence or something like that so that
They they still are you know in the Sun or whatever and they're not they're basically, you know, they really start to dry up
So that way the birds don't grab all of them on you
You can do that for you know, one of them it's good to leave them out for the birds
I mean why not but if you want to save something you're gonna make sure because they actually really love these things
They can go after those especially the very large mammoths one. So you'll just see them
They'll just be all on there and everything
so I
usually just take a few of them that I have and I put a couple in the containers cuz I love these things for
For the garden and for the bees because they do love these. They're great for the pollinators to attract, you know bees to your garden
So I just make sure I have a couple that are that are available
Now these these particular this variety is not this is not the ones that you would eat
I mean, I'm sure you can make oil out of it. You probably could eat them
I I wouldn't for this particular varieties, but there are other varieties that you can actually eat the seeds for it
But this one is this is a medium-sized plant
I didn't get the big mammoth ones this year, but I just got some medium ones cuz I want to see how they did and
They were okay. They weren't too bad. I had a late start on them because of the the bunnies
I'm gonna hold of these early, but they still managed to grow
anyway some so what you want to do is you want to make sure that
The that the head is actually dried out as you can see
It is it is fairly dry in here and also another indicator is on the back of the sunflower
You'll notice that there are brown spots on here
Basically, what you're looking for is that it's gonna be completely dry because you don't want this to be wet and it's actually still forming
the seeds a little bit in the back, you know in here so you basically want to make sure that it's completely
Almost dry and it really is pretty dry to the touch in here. So I
Cut this one off at the stalk, you know
You can cut the head off if you got a bunch of other ones in there and they're not quite ready yet
It can also do that as well
But there's a few different ways that you can do this, you know
You could just basically cut it off the stalk and then you just let it sit out for for quite some time
I I'm pretty simple when it comes to it. I'm just gonna just basically go ahead and scrape all the seeds out of here
So we'll show you how that is. Alright
So for those of you that don't know the sunflowers, they were actually used a lot by the Indians. They actually use these stalks
Actually, sometimes when they were immature stalks, they would they would actually cut them up and I think they would use them in their food
But you can also make they I guess they would make some kind of
Paper material out of it. They would ever see use the stalks for their beans where the beans would run up the the large stalks
You know for it and it would basically be a natural pole for their for their actual beans
And then they also use the the seeds they would eat them
But a lot of times they're also used for oil nowadays production of it, you know other things like that you can eat them
Alright so here what we're gonna do is we're just basically gonna I'm basically just gonna go in here and I'm just taking my finger
And I'm basically just kind of scraping out that's in here and you're gonna get a plate for it just like this
And what you're doing is you're just scraping out all the seeds that are underneath the layer of the dried-out
flour head
So it's kind of hard to know
If you can really see it in here, but you have to really open it up to get to expose them in there
So I kind of split this in half and then I'm gonna I'm basically just rubbing it
so I'm rubbing out all the seeds that are in here because they're kind of
It's almost like a matted rug kind of feeling when you put your hand in here and it's a kid between the little rug fibers
That's basically what it feels like if you if you have to rub your fingers in here
So I'm just going to go through and just rub all these seeds out
Yeah, let me know in the comments below what what what some flowers do you guys really like you it's the really humongous
gigantic ones or
Do you like the little smaller ones that you can kind of put on your deck?
Let me know in the comments below. I'd love to know what what varieties of some flowers you guys have this past summer
There was a near where we live in in Raleigh. They had they have a huge field of sunflowers
It was really beautiful they they were just everywhere I mean it was
Gosh, I don't know how many acres but it was a lot of sunflowers in one spot and everybody was down there filming
Filming themselves in the and then sunflowers, but they're really just beautiful to watch when they're when they're in full bloom
Alright, so that's half of that head and I think the other half is in the goats right here
So the other way that you could do this too is you know, I'm basically just scraping these out and like I said
it feels like a rug going to go into a rug is that you can cut that the head off and
basically, just let it sit and this and they will become really really dried out very brittle and
It will just be much easier to pull the seeds out. But this this this way is still
You can still do it as soon as you cut the head off, you know, it's really not not much to it
But most of the seeds I find they're kind of on the outside of it
They seem to be the best ones that are coming kind of coming out a little bit easier
And the rest of them are just kind of tucked in there
now if you have the big giant mammoth
Once you go obviously need a bigger bigger plate for this you can see a little critter right here
That's why you want to do this outside - I recommend it just do it outside because you got like little bugs and stuff in
Here and they're gonna get all over your house if you if you do it inside so definitely recommend to do this outdoors
Kind of on your porch or something or somewhere cover it up if you had a lot of these
You know, maybe spread them out. I would let them dry out to be honest - yeah, because it will make it a lot easier
Okay, so as you can see, there's you know, quite a bit of stuff in here
good thing about these seeds is that they're they're large enough that you can just you basically can just sort them out and
Pick them out
Now I also once like once I get these seeds out
I
Do like to let it especially if I cut that if I just cut the head I do want to let them dry a little
Bit I want to get them so they don't have as much moisture on them
so what I'm going to do is just separate all these out into like a little pile and
Then I will keep them out not necessarily in the Sun but I'll just keep them all in a nice
well-ventilated area and I'll let the outside of it dry a little bit because there's some there's some little
moisture on it from the plant itself
but once you once you get it all dry and
These are ready - these are actually ready to be planted for next year
You can basically once they get dried out I would suggest you
To get like a little envelope and I have these little coin envelopes. So I'll put a link on the show notes below
They're these little coin envelopes that I love to use for saving any my seeds
So I just basically labeled them up label them sunflower seeds and the variety and then I put the month on it
And then I just store them in there
so
Munoz some other ones the mammoth ones that you have they're gonna be a lot bigger
These are these are the small a variety of some flowers
So there are smaller seeds of course, but the big mammoth ones
I mean, they're like the ones that you would get like when you have sunflower seeds that you eat there
They're very large
So you might need a bigger envelope for those ones, but this will be enough to plant in the for
You know another batch of flowers next year. That's really it. That's it's pretty simple to
Save the sunflower seeds. Also, please give us a green thumbs up if you find this video helpful
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